Poem Of the week | The Freeze by Christian Ward
The Big Freeze of 1963
turned London into an open-air museum.
Foxes, caught in a taxidermist’s pose,
frozen in suspended animation.
Geese locked in cloud vaults.
Blackbirds glued to lawns. Trees
hard as enamel. The streets
shed their colours. Every resident
hermetically sealed. Childhoods, too.
The Thames, a poem showing
the city’s truth. Stepping outside
to receive November’s cold,
It feels like 1963, time suspended
like our love, the confetti of leaves
a map out of wherever the cold will take us.
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Cover photo Filip Bunkens on Unsplash.
